“I was disgusted but not surprised by Amnesty’s tacit support for Trump’s aggression against Venezuela for several reasons.”

Amnesty International told me that it “does not take a position on the current application” of U.S. economic sanctions that Trump’s administration imposed on Venezuela in August “but rather emphasizes the urgent need to address the serious crisis of the right to health and food which Venezuela is facing. In terms of human rights, it is the Venezuelan state’s responsibility to resolve this.” Amnesty’s full reply to three questions I asked them by email can be read here.

by Patrick Bond

GovernmentZA

Cyril Ramaphosa’s soft-coup firing of Jacob Zuma from the South African presidency on 14 February 2018, after nearly nine years in power and a bitter struggle to avoid resignation, has contradictory local and geopolitical implications. Amidst general applause at seeing Zuma’s rear end in the society, immediately concerns arise about the new president’s neo-liberal, pro-corporate tendencies, and indeed his legacy of financial corruption and class war against workers given the lack of closure on the 2012 Marikana Massacre.

African slaves held in bondage and tortured in the United States

This article is transcription from a lecture, which Abayomi Azikiwe delivered at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Detroit, Michigan on Sunday 18 February 2018. Abayomi Azikiwe presented the message for the day on the history and contemporary significance of mass incarceration and the enslavement and continued national oppression of the African American people.

The right wing Sangh Parivar elements are on a statue destroying spree in India. Just hours after Lenin’s statue was toppled in Tripura after BJP’s historic victory there, statue of Dravidian icon and social reformer EVR Ramasamy, popularly known as Periyar was vandalised in Tamil Nadu. The vandalisation came after a top BJP national secretary H Raja posted on FacebookRead More »

Tripura, an eastern-India state, is experiencing post-election violence, which is completely a rightist onslaught on its opposition political activists, the progressives. The onslaught has not spared a statue, a statue of Lenin; and thus it has confirmed the onslaught’s political character: extreme rightist; and extreme right is extreme anti-working classes; and working classes are the biggest segment of people. Thus, the extreme right forces stand against the working people irrespective of color and creed.Read More »